


Hawke mages are free mages

by stormthedarkcity



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Internalized Bigotry, background fenhawke - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22932007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormthedarkcity/pseuds/stormthedarkcity
Summary: Growing up, Oliver Hawke is much closer to his mother than to his father. She can’t do anything, though, when Oliver is twelve and comes into his magic.
Kudos: 6





	Hawke mages are free mages

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags!

Growing up, Oliver Hawke is much closer to his mother than to his father. She’s the one he comes to at night, when nightmares visit him, and it’s her who teaches him how to read and kisses his scraped knees better.

She can’t do anything, though, when Oliver is twelve, and terrified, and he’s just frozen a pond over just by touching it.

Oliver knew his father was a mage, of course. He’d seen him light the logs in the fireplace with a flick of his wrist, and he was well aware of the wooden staff hidden near the doorway, one with a pretty rock on top of it, that Oliver wasn’t supposed to touch.

When the pond is frozen in the middle of summer and Oliver is silently sobbing next to it, it’s his father who comes to him. There is no wound to kiss better, so he puts one of his own blankets around his shoulders, and hugs him tight until the tears stop shaking his small body.

Oliver begs. He begs to go to the Chantry. To ask a Templar for help. To be brought to a Circle, where they can keep him away from the people, away from the civilians, away from his own family.

His father refuses to even talk about it. He forbids him from going into the village, and Oliver goes to bed crying. He doesn’t fall asleep; can’t, for fear of meeting a demon he will set loose upon innocent people because of his own weakness.

His father comes to him at dawn. He sits by his bed, on the ground, looking like he hasn’t slept any more than Oliver. He tells him stories of the Circle. Of barely edible meals and Templars who wake them up in the dead of night just to send them on some nonsensical quest across the tower; of the absence of windows, of the water that’s always brown, of his friends’ eyes losing their light a little more every single day. He shows him scars on his arms, but he doesn’t say where they’ve come from. Oliver nods. He doesn’t want to know any more.

His father tells him more anyway. He speaks all morning, voice gentle but words hard and sharp like iron, until Oliver’s rumbling stomach reminds him he hasn’t eaten since the previous day.

When they sit together at lunch, with the twins bickering while his mother tries to calm them down, Oliver looks at his father. Really looks. Lingers on the bags under his eyes that never seem to leave, at the scars on his shoulders that don’t come from his farm work, at the way his eyes always dart to the door, even when he’s eating, as though someone might come in at any moment; and he decides that he shouldn’t go to a Circle.

“Hawke mages are free mages,” his father will say, later.

It’s what Oliver will tell Bethany, too, when she comes into her magic and starts looking toward the Templars posted in Lothering with something like resolute longing.

It’s what will keep him running, running away, from Kirkwall, from everything, long after his father has died, long after Bethany has died.

_Hawke mages are free mages._

It’s what he’ll tell Fenris, as a joke, a justification, when they’re slipping away from a dark Orlesian street, leaving behind two knocked-out Templars who were a little too eager to do their job.

“I understand,” Fenris will say.

And it will feel just like it used to feel, in Lothering, when his mother was listening to his nightmares and kissing his scraped knees better.


End file.
